Sonic Warfare Erupts in Pittsburgh, Honduras

Source: WIRED

* By David Hambling

Police in Pittsburgh are using sound blasters and other non-lethal weaponry to ward off protesters at the G-20 summit. The sonic weapon is the LRAD or Long Range Acoustic Device, a super loud-hailer deployed by U.S. forces and famously used to fight off pirates.

According to the Guardian, LRAD is being used in two ways: as a megaphone to order protesters to disperse, and, when they disobey, as an “ear-splitting siren” to drive them away. This has happened repeatedly, with the crowd assembling again a few streets away. It’s one of a number of controversial tactics being employed in the city; check out this video of a seeming “snatch-and-grab” arrest in the middle of a demonstration.

The sonic weaponry appears to be having a much greater effect thousands of miles from Pittsburgh, in Honduras. A siege situation has developed in the capital Tegucigalpa, where ousted President Manuel Zelaya is holed up in the Brazilian Embassy. The security forces can’t launch an assault, but they are stepping up the pressure with sound blasters and psychological warfare tactics.

Forced into exile in a coup three months ago, Zelaya sneaked back into the country on Monday. He gave speeches to crowds of supporters from an embassy balcony, calling for a peaceful solution to the current crisis. Recognizing the risk of a popular response, the coup leaders sent in security forces to clear the area using tear gas and water cannon. According to the Guardian, twenty people were injured and at least 170 detained following the disturbance; the BBC say that at least one person died.

The embassy is now surrounded. Water, electricity and telephone lines have been cut off.

SNIP - FOLLOW LINK PLEASE

Read more: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/09/sonic-warfare-erupts-in-pittsburgh-honduras/

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The use of these weapons on the Brazilian Embassy is in violation of the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.

Very interesting that varieties of these "non-lethal" but assuredly offensive weapons are being deployed against protesters simultaneously in the United States and Honduras on the same day.

Let's concentrate on the Honduran incident:

The Miami Herald engaged in an odious trivialization of the attack in its report today from Tegucigalpa. Rather than headlining the actual story -- that the Honduran golpistas are using offensive weapons against the Brazilian Embassy -- the Herald leads with a claim that Zelaya mistakenly thought the weapons employ radiation rather than sound, in an attempt to make him look ridiculous and make it look like the story is somehow being made up inside his head.

Zelaya's mistaken perceptions of what "non-lethal" force is being aimed at him and the other people inside the embassy - assuming that his statements are even being reported honestly by the Herald - are irrelevant to the news of the golpistas' latest violent crime.

By contrast, excellent and extensive coverage of this outrage is afforded today at narconews.com:

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/3460/honduran-coup-regime-mocks-un-security-council-embassy-attacks

the rioting douchebags? How many bystanders would that get killed.

are "rioting douchebags," and apparently you don't mean the ones calling world policy from the podium; or if you think the only available choices for crowd control are between shattering a few dozen eardrums or gunning down a few hundred people in cold blood.

In Honduras, the Brazilian embassy personnel are not "rioting." They are working, and being attacked by an offensive weapon, whether or not it is designated as "non-lethal."

as ooglymoogly stated, "Excellent reply to ignorance."

Since when is a democracy movement "rioting douchebags"?

It's called vandalism and vandals are douchebags.

Police State - here we are.

with a zap from a taser or after beating their skulls in with a baton. These don't look like the type to come peacefully, so what do you suggest exactly? Fire hoses, rubber bullets, tear gas?

We aren't talking about G20 here. We're talking about how the defacto Honduran government police are using these units against the Brazilian embassy. You need a comprehension course.

Thanks for your condescension.

n/t

:rofl:

sound blasters and psychological warfare tactics....

What is the context of your comment? It sure is NOT this thread's OP.
Maybe people whose hearing is being destroyed are getting irritated? Who did what first where?

http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id239/pg1/index.html

the battle in seattle
by Nick Mamatas

One of the largest, sustained political protests in the United States since the Vietnam War will be remembered always, thanks to a single omnipresent image. The image isn't a burning American flag or a phalanx of riot cops standing over the broken bodies. Instead the corporate media chose the picture of the shattered windows and gutted interior of a Starbucks to symbolize the Battle In Seattle over the World Trade Organization's millennium round.
Unable to count to ten and thus understand that the millennium begins in 2001, not 2000, the WTO is also interested in lowering barriers to trade across the world. In addition to eliminating sometimes counter-productive tariffs and ridiculous protectionist policies, WTO policy guts environmental and labor laws and twists the arms of Third World countries, in order to make them comply with a free trade regime designed solely to help the United States and the European Union. Potentially, even basic protections like voluntary labeling of food products or the right to organize labor unions (a pretty important right if you're a 12 year-old Indonesian who is chained to a lathe 12 hours a day, or an American computer programmer whose carpals have been splintered by typing 12 hours a day) were threatened by the Seattle WTO meeting.

The meeting failed. Instead of a handful of lukewarm protestors simply yelling at imperialism, nearly 100 000 people hit the streets. The trade unions who gave Bill Clinton $30 million dollars in 1996 finally turned against him, and didn't blame all their problems on poor Mexicans. The Freedom for Tibet crowd realized that confronting the global economy would be more effective than listening to REM and quietly weeping. Environmentalists stopped writing poems about the mighty redwood for a few days and turned the urban streets into a wild zone. Because Seattle is the most heavily unionized city in the United States, and is located near environmentally sensitive bodies of water and forests, it was the perfect choice for a massive protest.

The media however, decided that thirty anti-civilization anarchists from Eugene, Oregon and other areas in the Pacific Northwest were more important. One less Starbucks in Seattle got more ink than the AFL-CIO finally standing up to the Democrats. The death of The Gap was mourned, but police provocation was ignored. I personally received over 50 email reports from unrelated activists and witnesses, all of them agreed that time and again, the cops started the violence and made escape impossible. The use of tear gas, rubber bullets and flailing batons were described as a 'response' by the news, and it was a response. A response to people standing up for themselves, their planet and their way of life! Even trade ministers and delegates from countries in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean decided to stand with the protestors; the army of police, emergency curfews and virtual martial law may have made some of them feel at home.

The people of Seattle were less than happy with their right to walk down the street or visit friends being summarily taken away. And they did something about it, and may just have saved life as we know it, if only for a little while. Now, what are you going to do about it?

It's the conquest of bread, American-style.

not either an agent provocateur or simply an opportunist who isn't really there for the protest?

... who demonstrate recreationally on Sundays at various regular spots in Western cities.

However, today I am on their side. Even though they are douchebags, Because it's Pittsburgh.

One of my partners was part of the famous Battle of Seattle. The thing that made it famous is that the true word got out. In Pittsburgh, it's working just fine. The media worked just the way they wanted it to at the couple of huge demonstrations they were able to make just disappear. Magicians have nothing on these poeple.

I know that our guy is there with all the pageantry, but it's still a G____ Summit and those are predicated on some really fucked up "values" and allegiances and the protesters are there to try to get another point of view out there.

Too bad your mind is too closed.

But, it is just an assumption because I have no idea what you just said. It is an amusing sounding word, though.

Like this:

Piffle.

These people are protesting a coup by an illegitimate group of people. They are protesting to have the duly elected president put back in power where he should be. Why r u here if you think people that really believe in upholding real democracy are douchebags?

Most were. The ones smashing windows and setting fires got what they deserve. I'm glad the cops are using less lethal form of riot control.

Culpability is clearer.

and as there's still sort of a functioning justice system and a First Amendment, and as usually they haven't broken laws or done anything other than express their rights of speech and assembly, they almost always go free! For many of them, this serves as encouragement, as confirmation that they're doing the right thing.

Sonic weapons that indiscriminately hit everyone in the area -- like your usual police riots, but even more effective -- provide a group punishment and message to all of the protesters, with no need of arrests, courts or paperwork, and without the confirmation that having the judge drop your charges provides.

Not that I think this is going to work. The development of such weapons smacks of desperation about crowds one day becoming uncontrollable, as well as a group sociopathy among the designers and makers of the machines.

Also, they're obviously big business, with the irony that the people paying the bill are among the same ones who later get their eardrums cracked and their organs bruised.

Active Denial System - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaInformally, the weapon is also called pain ray. Raytheon is currently marketing a reduced-range version of this technology. The ADS is currently being ...

Effects - Demonstration - Controversy - Silent Guardian
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System - Cached - Similar

Run away the ray-gun is coming : We test US army's new secret ...Sep 18, 2007 ... I am told not to call it a ray-gun, though that is precisely what it ... What makes it OK, says Raytheon, is that the pain stops as soon as ...
www.dailymail.co.uk/.../Run-away-ray-gun-coming--We-test-US-armys-new-secret-weapon.html - Similar

Raytheon's Pain Ray: Coming to a Protest Near You? | Rights and ...May 29, 2008 ... Solidarity is fine but inchoate blogging in the face of the bitter outrage of things like the Raytheon Pain-Ray seems a little light (I ...
www.alternet.org/rights/86692/ - Cached - Similar

Defense Tech: Lab Defense: Pain RayRaytheon has built a Humvee-mounted model, which is currently being tested before a ... The Air Force is developing an airborne version of the pain ray. ...
www.defensetech.org/archives/001652.html - Cached - Similar

funny to hear a scumbag, calling people duchebags.

have a nice day

throw up several columns of Marshalls and have a DJ throw down some drum n bass.

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

But unless I missed something, this is the first time the LRADS have been used on American protesters.

Because after all, the only other option to the "non-lethal" sonic cracking of skulls is to machine gun everyone associated with the protest. There's no middle ground, see?

Soon, they'll be using it in top-to-bottom sweeps of subsidized housing.

Just like Tasers were supposed to be a tool to help cops protect themselves, and now they're being used on guys in wheelchairs.

based both on the prevailing ideology and the history of these things.

if they can still hear what their attorneys are saying!

We still sort of have a court system to rectify, at great personal cost to the litigants, a random portion of the injustices the fed and state executives perpetrates as fait accompli. (Often enough, instead of rectify you can say exacerbate.) It's a leaky dam against total barbarism, but a dam of sorts.

These weapons don't discriminate.
They harm everybody within range, including media, "non-participating" observers, legal residents, men, women, children....especially children (permanent damage?)....everyone.

Bring On the Lawsuits.

over it just a week ago. i wonder if the wingers will take notice of this.

Maybe if they did this shit to conservative protesters, we'd finally be rid of the damn things.

My belief doesn't extend to machines. I hope some resourceful protesters find a way to destroy these awful things. Unfortunately, sabotage is only taught to fake anarchists.

For example, if they fire teargas at you, and you're wearing a gas mask, they will shoot you.

Maybe with a beanbag.

Maybe with a rubber bullet.

Maybe with a lead bullet.

Whether it's happening in Tehran, Honduras or here.

I'm just saying, if you don't want to die, you should probably run away instead of standing there with a gas mask and ear protectors on while giving the finger to the LRAD operator.

actually, i wish there could be a coming together, a transcending of ideology, between some on the left and right. factionalization is how we're kept "in place."

Usually it is not the protesters that harm property. It is nearly always either undercover police or their agents that perform the damage, in order to give the police justification to harshly silence peaceful protesters.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/may/10/g20-policing-agent-provacateurs
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/08/23/police-montebello.html
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9905E5D91430F931A15751C1A9639C8B63


I wonder if a few sniper rounds into the dish would silence these devices?

Actually, I know your point but it makes no sense.

I suppose I should go back and change it, but that would make your response nonsensical, and it is amusing, so I'll just leave it.

None of us are going to convince each other on a thread that alternatively calls people protesters and douchebags.

I know this may be hard to believe, but sometimes the douchebag is me.

I think the people who stay the longest on DU are the ones who can sling it as well as they take it.

I could be wrong.

There's a technology, that if you search for it using the right keywords you'll probably find it, cancels sound. Soundwaves are visualized as similar to a simplistic sine wave, with positive and negative portions. Essentially what the cancellation technology does is match the sound wave, but then inverts it timewise, so one wave is "subtracted" from the other wave. That means when the positive portion of the wave from the sound source is sounding, the canceling technology matches that with an equal but negative wave. Result is no net sound.

It's probably much cheaper to have marchers with some kind of mufflers and other ear protection on.

There used to be plans online somewhere for how to build the circuits, but it's probably now buried in such a way that just the right keyword would need to be used to find the pages, if they're still online.


Here's a simplistic page about soundwaves
http://www.mediacollege.com/audio/01/sound-waves.html

Here's a short page about sound cancellation:
http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_6/chpt_4/11.html

However, what kinds of sounds these sound cannons are making might be obscure and very high tech, they may create more than just sound, and the hardware probably is using expensive e-components whose circuit effects would be hard to duplicate with cheaper components, except with another sound cannon. It's probably hard to find information on their specifications.

Not that that is the topic of this OP, at least not directly.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/22/report_from_honduras_ousted_president_manuel

....
MARK WEISBROT: Yes. Well, I think it will make a big difference. You know, there’s been a big gap from the beginning, since the coup on June 28th. There’s been a big gap between the United States and the rest of the world on this situation. You know, the General Assembly of the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations, they all said right away that they wanted an immediate and unconditional return of the elected president, Zelaya. And the United States has never really said that. In fact, the Arias accords put all kinds of conditions on his return, including incorporating the people who led the coup into his government and moving the elections forward. And in fact, as Andres mentioned, you know, Brazil has been a strong supporter of Zelaya, and the foreign minister of Brazil said a couple months ago—he complained to Hillary Clinton that these conditions were placed in the Arias agreement, that, you know, this was not what the Organization of American States wanted or the United Nations or anyone else. So he said this publicly. And so, there’s always been this big gap, but the administration has been able to paper it over, because there hasn’t been much attention on Honduras.

And so, now, with the General Assembly and the attention focused by Zelaya’s dramatic return, Obama is going to have to choose sides more than they have in the past. They’ve been very—this administration has been very ambivalent. They’ve gone back and forth, you know, between saying that, you know, he should be restored and then saying really almost the opposite. And on August 4th, they sent a letter, for example, to President Lugar , where they backed off quite a bit from supporting Zelaya.

And, you know, Zelaya has been here six times since he was overthrown, here in Washington, and President Obama has not met with him once, even though he’s gotten requests from people who are very close friends and allies of his and Democratic members of Congress.

And so, these are the kind of signals, mixed signals, that this government has sent to the leaders of the coup, and that has strengthened their resolve all the way along. And they’re very stubborn right now, for example. It’s going to take a lot more pressure to get them out of there, a lot more, both international and domestic, from within the United States. There’s going to have to be a lot more pressure on the Obama administration to actually force them to leave.

AMY GOODMAN: And exactly what could the Obama administration do if it was committed to preserving the democratically elected leader Zelaya? What is the relationship the US has with Honduras?

MARK WEISBROT: Oh, there’s quite a bit more they could do. .............

US is not the same as USG. What are the corporate interests up to?

These guys rely at the least on non-interference and accomodation after they pull off a coup, in keeping with the historically established system - that's what I mean by structural.

I have no idea to what degree the admin's in on anything, or merely itself structurally compliant to the established system.

But I think that if the CIA were really behind this, Obama would have officially recognized the government as soon as the coup succeeded.

But Pandora's box is already open. To whoever called us crazy when we said these weapons would soon be used on American soil, and to anyone defending it now. Go fuck yourselves.

Which means that if you get ear protection this crowd control weapon is useless against any organized group.

They may be very specialized dampers set to protect against specific frequecies the weapon uses. Regular old ear plugs may not cut it.

I was talking about an 'organized' group getting the right ear protection. It isn't that hard to imagine that smart people come up with solutions all the time.

...is very concerning. I realize for American audiences it's probably harder to identify with how repellent use of this particular device is and so it was an unfortunate but fortuitous coincidence that the use of this technology in Pittsburgh is bringing this into a wider discussion.

Many so-called "less than lethal" weapons are misappropriated technologies which originally had entirely different applications in mind. Bringing these devices into the realm of the "toolkit" available to police forces seems (based on my experience with the taser phenomenon) to be a fast-track process which often leaves any sort of serious study on the effects of these weapons, behind.

PB

probably remembers the Panamanian civilians who reported that American troops were MELTING PEOPLE using some type of laser device. Of course, the military denied it. After all, we all know those Panamanians will say anything.

Thanks for posting that, bridgit.

and security personnel are indiscriminately targeting even peaceful demonstrators, it is apparent that the purpose of these weapons is as much a psychological deterrent as a physical one.

After enough stories come out showing police beating the piss out of protesters who did nothing worse than show up to protest something, or showing them using these heinous SpaceAge anti-personnel weapons against protestors, there will be the effect of discouraging ANY form of organized dissent on the streets of American cities.

When the frustration and the level of anger rises to the fever pitch and angry, disenfranchised Americans take violent action against police and Fatherland Security personnel who are repressing them, that's when the for-real police state kicks into action. A population can only take so much before they rise against their oppressors. It seems to me that the Powers That Be are trying to bring Americans to the point that they will actually use violence just so the police state can be fully activated.

I know that sounds very dark and pessimistic, but the signs are everywhere.

If our elected representatives, including President Obama, do not go on record against this type of repression, we are truly screwn. Given the tepid response of our government to the events in Honduras, I hold out no hope for democracy to survive this onslaught.

Dark but realistic.

the BushCo bag of tricks and come up with "protest zones" that are far away from those G20 participants the demonstrations are designed to impress.

I understand that it would be foolish and asking for trouble to allow the protestors to walk right up to the doors of the center where the talks were being held, but it's not asking too much to allow them to demonstrate where their demonstration can be seen and heard. Given the number of police, private security types, Fatherland Security, and national guardsmen on hand, it would be possible to have enough of a police presence to immediately arrest any person who started being violent or destroying property.

We know that the security organizations always have undercover types in the crowds of demonstrators, so why couldn't they be used to legitimately keep the thugs from disrupting an otherwise peaceful protest? The anarchistic ones that I have seen in videos of the demonstrations in Seattle, Minneapolis, and now Pittsburgh were all pretty easily identifiable by their clothing and the gear they were carrying.

Just some thoughts on this. Comments?

The protestors, other than the agent provocateurs, are fairly peaceful on the whole. What the elites understand is that nothing talks like images. The images of Abu Ghraib, as awful as they were here, gave the message to the ME that the gloves were off and that the US would torture you if you got in its way. The fact that many of the detainees were not terrorists at all but just normal folks who got rounded up for money underlined that fact. It was the same messages that Chile sent in 1973 to its citizens. Images of Katrina were used to show how the government was not going to protect citizens anymore and it was a message to the world: if we are willing to treat our own people this way (and let almost 2K die in flood waters) then guess how we will deal with you.

The transnational elites are about themselves--the rest of us are expendable to them. We make the mistake of looking at national borders and thinking that policies are about what occurs in those borders. To the transnationals, there are no national borders.

Torture and democracy - Darius M. Rejali - 2007 - Political Science - 849 pages
... Noise In this chapter, I discuss the place of unbearable noise in torture. First, I survey historical uses of noise, distinguishing unbearable noise ...
books.google.com/books?isbn=0691114226...

And as used in Pittsburgh and Tegucigalpa, it's an offensive weapon.

in our town, Pittsburgh. Disturbing.

Would you happen to know how and why Pittsburgh was selected?

And also, WHEN did Pittsburgh purchase this device and for how much...and from whom...would be interesting to know.

A couple of weeks ago in San Diego,at a Darrel Issa townhall meeting, one of these sound cannons was brought in-although my understanding is that it wasn't actually "fired up",just displayed for intimidation I suppose.

:think: